forex demo account

Dummy Trades

When trading in a demo account, you will generally be taking so-called "dummy trades". Such transactions have no reality in terms of the impact of their profits or losses on your actual trading portfolio, so you can afford to make mistakes with them which you can then learn from.

Live Trading

Live trading or "going live" is what most aspiring forex traders want to move on to after being successful trading a demo account. This means that you place real funds at risk on each trade, and your portfolio has to take whatever the market offers you in terms of profit or loss. Most traders just starting out in forex will want to see that their trading strategy works well on a demo account before taking the plunge to start live trading.

Virtual Money

Virtual money is what you will be trading with in your demo account. Since virtual money is free, most brokers will provide you with a rather large amount of it that you can then trade freely until it probably eventually disappears.

Also, if you wish to practice trading more using your demo account, you will probably want to have an account with a larger initial amount of virtual money to play with. Amounts around $100,000 seem to be the norm for virtual money provided with demo accounts.

Trading Platform Access

If your purposes in open a demo account involve checking out the forex broker's trading platform, be sure to ascertain whether opening a demo account will give you access to the real platform.

Also, when it comes to providing trading platform access, most brokers offer two main options. The first is an online trading platform usually accessed via your Internet browser. The second is a client-side trading platform that will generally need to be downloaded and installed on your Windows-based PC. Both options require an Internet connection to provide up-to-date pricing and trade execution in your forex demo account.

Finding the best forex demo account

Finding the best forex demo account - FAQ

When first starting out trading forex, or when considering switching to a new forex broker, many traders option to open a forex demo or practice account. Most importantly, this allows them to practice trading using the broker's trading platform to see if they find it sufficiently to their liking. Furthermore, opening such an account also often lets traders try out additional services of the broker providing it.

Keep in mind that finding the best forex demo account for your purposes may require opening more than one demo account to test the most promising forex broker prospects. You can identify forex brokers you might want to test out with a demo account by doing some preliminary research online among the available broker reviews and Internet discussion forums for reputable and reliable forex brokers.

To help you in your search, the following list has been compiled to illustrate what features that you might want to look for in a forex demo account.